Skye and Grant's journey through life
by bhut
Summary: Or, how Skye and Grant met and lived the rest of their lives. (AU).
1. Chapter 1

**First Meeting**

 _Disclaimer: none of the characters belong to me._

 _Across the multiverse._

…Skye's motor had not broken down – yet.

Well, that is, it was not her motor per se – she was not a cyborg, thank you very much – it was her van's motor…and she should've really found a mechanic to look at it, but lately, or recently, the life of Mary-Sue 'call me Skye!' Poots did not involve mechanics or anyone. She was a free, independent young woman, completely self-sufficient, and she could repair her own van!..

Well, no, she couldn't – her speciality were computers and hacking, not cars and their maintenance, but right now her priorities were more like going to the public laundromat and cleaning her scant supplies of laundry. She was not proud of it – of her scant supplies of laundry, that is, Skye would have liked to have more, but because she was now independent, self-sufficient, etc., she didn't own a lot of things, and most of them, those things, were related to computers; Skye's van was her biggest exception…

Something moved in its' innards, even as Skye reminisced about her current position in life – Skye's one and only, (currently), companion – her daemon. Everyone, every person in the world got assigned one by a higher power from their birth and till their death, a mysterious entity that could take on the form of any animal (and more) at will…until the person in question stopped being a child and became an adult, after which, the daemon's form became settled and simple – just one animal. Period.

Skye's daemon got settled with a form of a snake – some sort of a pit viper, as she discovered via Google. Well, so far so good, though the dramatic irony – that Skye's daemon became a snake permanently after she left St. Agnes' Orphanage for good with no intention of returning to it, or embracing the Catholic church as the adults in the Orphanage had intended for her…no. Not for her, not for Skye. She was done with it and gone from them; she was living in her van…and her daemon, her oldest and best friend was a snake. So what?!

"Where're you going?" the daemon in question enquired.

"I'm going to the laundromat, to wash my other clothes," Skye explained patiently – she could tell that her daemon was sort of missing her former skills of being able to alternate between many, many forms. Skye's daemon fancied herself a jack of all trades; now she had to become a master of one, and was kind of sulking…unlike Skye herself, really, who was just being lonely, a self-sufficient master hacker or not!..

"Aren't you wearing your other clothes?" the daemon asked again.

"No, I'm wearing them, I'm going to was my other-other clothes, I mean my initial clothes…I'm not good with those word games, sorry," Skye muttered, because her daemon actually was – in fact, word games tended to cheer her up. "Want to come with me to the laundromat instead?"

"Sure!" the daemon immediately perked up and crawled up Skye's sleeve into her sweater – she hated the cold, not a real snake or otherwise. "Let's go!"

"I think I've been had…" Skye muttered, grabbed her laundry bag, turned around from her van – and smacked into a muscular torso.

"Watch it!" the speaker snapped, looming over Skye, (who herself was not really petite). "Where're you going?"

"Excuse me?" Skye blinked, as the speaker's – a very manly speaker's, BTW – own daemon looked through the collar…well, over the collar: it was another snake; a rattlesnake, actually.

"Hello!" Skye's daemon stared at the newcomer with a clear, concrete interest. "I haven't met another snake yet! Is it your final form? How are you doing?"

The bigger reptile/daemon blinked and looked at his own owner. "Behave," the latter said, before pausing. "Um, you two want to come inside?"

Skye blinked, feeling oddly shy herself – she had not had too much experience with attractive men back in the Orphanage, because reasons, (mostly connected with Catholicism and its' partial segregation of genders). "Well," she said, trying to regain her footing and some space for maneuvers. "Laundry?"

"The laundromat is nearby, want me to show you?" the man himself sounded off-balance – the similarity of their daemons was the key; few people had matching daemons, and Skye's daemon – a pit viper of some sort – was very similar to her counterpart, which was a rattlesnake, again. This great similarity of their daemons meant…Skye did not know what it meant; she, regrettably, had never studied daemons very intently, (even though they were a part of school education, even in orphanages), so there was that…

"The laundromat," their new companion, (well, one of the two) said brightly, opening the door for Skye and her laundry, and her own daemon. "Come in?"

Skye, realizing that she was dawdling, blushed and got inside. Inside, the air was much warmer and drier than it was in the streets; both of the daemons immediately abandoned their human partners and raced across the floor into a darker, out of the way corner of the laundromat, where they began to…interact, clearly happy to meet another snake-shaped daemon after years of loneliness; Skye was barely able to notice that the second daemon was not only shaped like a rattlesnake, but was also mottled in color, covered in bands of scaled colored black and white and grey – as opposed to her own daemon, which was a monotonous, bright banana yellow color. (And no rattle either).

"So, I'm Skye?" she turned to the man…paused, and got her laundry started. "Nice to meet you."

"Nice to meet you too. I'm Grant," the man himself looked away, eyeing the two daemons, which were knotting themselves into a knot and blinked. "So, um, are you new in town?"

"Yes!" Skye spoke with an almost desperate brightness. "I and my daemon just drove in. In our van. You don't need a computer specialist, do you?"

"Are you good and experienced?" Grant raised an eyebrow. "…With computers, I mean?"

"Yes! Phrasing! I mean, I am!" Skye turned red. "Do you have a girlfriend?" she added, rather miserably, as she half-sensed and half-realized that the two daemons were clearly engaged in exploring each other…in depth, and she and, ah, Grant, were not. (And they could not – not in public, and they would not – they just met, but still…)

"No," Grant himself was even redder. "I'm single. I'm giving you a test run…," he groaned. "That's not what I meant!"

"I know," Skye patted him on a shoulder. "Phrasing?"

"Phrasing."

Silence fell. It was late during the day, the laundromat was practically empty, and that suited Grant and Skye just fine: their daemons were really busy with each other in public, and that was bad enough.

"…You know," Skye muttered after a pause, feeling somewhat jealous of her daemon. "I think that this is going to be a beginning of a beautiful friendship."

Grant just nodded in agreement.

 _End of First Meeting_


	2. Chapter 2

**Kara and Tripp**

 _Disclaimer: all the characters here belong to their respective owners._

Several days have passed. Somewhat reluctantly, despite the relentless prodding of her daemon, Skye moved her van into Grant's garage – literally speaking, not metaphorically, though as far as their daemons were concerned, the metaphors were there as well.

"So, you're one of the owners of-"

"-Roxton's," Grant finished helpfully, as he finished helping Skye to move in. "Maybe you have seen us?"

"The guy with the cereal? His daemon is this strange-looking bird-"

"It is called a toucan, and 'the guy' is Tripp – his name is Antoine Tripplet," Grant elaborated. "It must be admitted – when his daemon settled on a bird for his final shape, none of us expected it to be, well, a toucan; none of us knew what a toucan really was – we had to look it up on the Google!"

"And how many of you are there?" Skye frowned. Not that she cared, but…she was interested.

"There was me, Tripp, and Kara – well, Kara Lynn Palamas," Grant replied helpfully, his own face carefully blank. "She's our lawyer. Tripp is in the front, and I provide the financial support and etc."

"That's nice," Skye wrinkled her nose, becoming quite aware that Grant really, really hated to talk about…anything, really, and you almost had to use pincers to get him to speak…and no, that almost wasn't a metaphor either. Pity, because he was certainly handsome…

"And you're looking so silently because-?" the man in question asked, suspiciously. "I thought that you liked to talk?"

"Well, [bleep] you!" Skye snapped, and turned red, seeing as both of their daemons perked up with her saying that. "This isn't an offer, BTW. Or an invite."

"Of course not," Grant said, blandly. "So, uh, a Catholic Orphanage, you said?"

"Yes," it was Skye's to look down at the carpet. "It was…it wasn't a _bad_ place, and the nuns were quite helpful, but I, I had no intention of joining them in the arms of Christ or whatever; it just wasn't for me." She looked askance. "Maybe Roxton's will be, however. Can I meet your friends sometime in the future, maybe? If I get a job-"

"Well, I did tweet them about you and your daemon," Grant admitted sheepishly, "and they tweeted right back that they had to see it – you don't often get daemon matches, you know-?"

"Um," Skye looked away. Truth be told, she did make friends easily, to be sure, but she also lost them easily; living a nomadic life in a van led her to that sort of character; for her to pull down roots and to live alongside the same group of people, (friends or not), for a permanent, (or at least a semi-permanent basis) was something else. "So you three go back a long time?"

"Kind of sort of," Grant drummed his fingers. "At first we didn't have too much in common; still don't, aside from Roxton's, but it's enough – sometimes you don't have too much in common to be friends, it seems…" he trailed away, lost in thoughts, and so was Skye, actually, as she thought about her own childhood and fellow orphans, sometimes quite friendly, back at the Orphanage. Did she regret leaving it behind? Perhaps, but she knew that if she had stayed, she would have regretted _that_ decision even more…

There was a knock on the door.

"They're here already?" Skye asked Grant, more morosely than how she had expected: this was possibly too fast for her liking.

"Not on my doing," Grant blinked as he walked over to his front door and, well, opened it. "Tripp. Kara? What gives? Here already?"

"Sorry," came the voice of another man. "I guess that we… no. I have no idea of what we were doing…okay. Yeah, we were thinking of having an intervention for you when your tweet came. Really a matching daemon?"

Almost as if on cue, two more daemons flew into the room and flew right over to where Grant's and Skye's own pair were resting, still wrapped around each other, and enjoying the warm house. One of the two newcomers was the toucan, a big-beaked bird, a daemon belonging to the front's-man of Roxton's. The second was a bat of some sort, more drab in color, but surprisingly delicate, though very adroit at flying, (better so than the bird in question did).

"…Yes, a matching daemon," Grant echoed, sounding honestly cross-here. "See? It's Skye's, and it's almost banana-yellow in color."

"It looks very nice," this time the speaker was a woman…and then Skye saw the woman, who was dressed rather professionally, in a crisp, high-maintenance manner. Clearly, that was where the supposed Kara belonged, and it was okay, really – Skye did not mind, not one little bit. She wasn't high-maintenance, she had female friends in the past, and so-

"Hi!" she brightly told the other woman. "I'm Skye!"

"I'm Kara!" the other woman in question promptly shook her hand. "Uh, nice daemon?"

"So's yours?" Skye continued to echo Kara, even as she was becoming aware that would not do in the end. "Nice to meet you?" she could not keep the doubt out of her voice though.

"Likewise," Kara nodded, even as she wrapped her arm around Skye's shoulders and led her into another room. "Let's talk…"

Tripp and Grant were left alone, (the daemons were busy with each other, now and here), and did their best not to look at each other instead. "So, intervention?" Grant finally asked. "What's with that?"

"You know, um, it's a good thing that Kara likes me better and everything, but you shouldn't be alone either-"

"I'm not," Grant pointed out. "I've got both of you – in a non-sexual way, but I think that even Kara is moving past the entire 'orgy' phase-"

"Yes, but abstinence isn't a solution either-"

"And you would know-"

Tripp groaned. Yes, he was far more outgoing than the other man in the room was, and far more successful when it came to sexual matters, but that was not what he was going here. "Ward. Are we still friends?"

"Yes, but we're not having a threesome either!"

"Considering that you got Skye now it would be more of a full-blown orgy…right. Can I try again?" Tripp winced, aware that this was so not the time for this sort of humor with Ward, even moreso than it was normally.

"Okay," Grant gave Tripp an unamused look. "I'm listening."

"All of us could've handled the entire love triangle better," Tripp admitted, "and what's more, we really do want you to be happy."

"I _am_ happy," Grant insisted. "Really. This is my default happy face!"

Tripp blinked and took a double-look at his friend. "This new girl, Skye, she's good for you," he reached his conclusion. "What's her specialty, her profession?"

"She's good with computers," Grant replied.

"Really? Good! We could use a computer-savvy person at our place-"

"Excuse me," Skye walked back in, followed by Kara. "Are you three always like that?"

"Yes," Grant admitted, before he was interrupted by a soft, yet an audible thump coming from the outside. "…Tripp. Kara. Did you check the weather forecast before coming here? Because I sure didn't."

There was a decisively sheepish and guilty pause. "…What am I missing now?" Skye crossly asked, when a blackout hit.

"We get those in winter," Tripp explained, 'helpfully," even as his and the other daemons got their human partners flashlights, and explained to Skye's own companion as to what has happened. "Looks like we're all staying overnight here."

Grant almost groaned.

 _End Tripp and Kara_


End file.
